Deborah Bogen

Click on the link above to read some poems that are not in either book.  I change these every week or so.

Click on title to read sample poems

"Deborah Bogen's poems have a kind of unpretentious authority, sometimes ruefully realistic, sometimes quietly mysterious; the whole of Landscape With Silos goes to make something stronger and greater than its parts."  ---Jean Valentine

"Here are poems of a lively intelligence, agile, wounded and wise. Landscape With Silos is a well-crafted, beautifully imagined, and transforming work. It is free verse that conjures form, and the poet reveals a range of mind and emotion that holds the reader entranced. This is, quite simply, a marvelous book." ---Betty Adcock

"Deb Bogen writes poetry that is naked and necessary, unadorned and political, intelligent and generous. The book brims with intelligence. And reality.---Carol Frost

This is George Klawitter’s review of Landscape With Silos Bogen, Deborah, Landscape With Silos,
Huntsville: Texas Review Press, 2006, 71 pages, $12.95 paperwork, ISBNB 1-881515-93-1

             After publishing widely in poetry journals (e.g., Field, Shenandoah, The Indiana Review), Deborah Bogen won the 2002 ByLine Press Chapbook competition judged by Edward Hirsch, and her presents volume, Landscape with Silos, won the X.J.. Kennedy Poetry Prize in 2005. This collection of forty-seven poems, divided into four sections, represents her strongest work to date. She has gained fame across the country for poems that speak to common life and on occasion address our political climate.

                In her title poem, “Landscape with Silos” Bogen works subtle magic with vivid language. After brushing in down-home images for this North Dakota piece – “the palsied ghosts of cloud-stained women…a deep freeze filled with molasses cookies” she introduces government men and their underground missile silos: “they didn’t scare us, those missiles,/not the men either who rose like bankers, / sat calmly at the counter, starched and pressed”. She does not have to voice her disdain for the weapons because that sneer is carried under her quiet portrait of men who scare us even if they do not scare her. In other poems Bogen uses a similar technique, sneaking up on readers: just as we are settling into a poem about teaching art to children at a community center, we find ourselves hit by the news of war and body counts. Sweet repose set us up for her real purpose, a solid indictment of war.

            For me, the heart of the book is the second clutch of poems, titled “The Poem Ventures Out.” It is Bogen’s “ars poetica” by which she lets poetry become personified, sticking its nose in various venues. From the eleven poems, we learn that poetry is essential to the human spirit and can rub us into realities we never dreamed would be susceptible to insights on life, love and death. Ultimately, Bogen confides “Relax, the poems told me,/ remember these are words-/something you can alter,/later.”  We somehow feel, however, that neither she nor we wish to alter what she tells us. The entire sequence is quite a wonderful apologia.

            Bogen’s poems are significant and will find a permanent spot in twenty-first century American poetry.  If you  buy only one book of poetry this month, Landscape with Silos, is the one for this month.

George Klawitter

St. Edward’s University

Click on the Title for sample poems.

In choosing Living by the Children’s Cemetery as the 2002 ByLine Competition winner, esteemed poet and critic, Edward Hirsch, said "Living by the Children’s Cemetery provides a profound answer to the poet’s own call for "something sinister, something fragile, something Bessie Smith/ could sing."